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In the Graphical Interface its easy, you can just open a new shell while leaving the other running in the background. But the graphical interface causes my laptop to always crash, so I am trying to do it all from the command prompt.

You can also move a process to the background by ctrl + z
and then bg % this will return you to the prompt. To bring the process back to the foreground then fg %
Show the status of all background and suspended jobs: jobs
Bring a job back into the foreground: fg %jobnumber
Bring a job back into the background: bg %jobnumber
Where jobnumber is the number given after hitting ctrl + z

Example

Code:

#netdiscover -i eth0
then ctrl + z sends a stop signal and returns
[1]+ stopped (giving a prompt) then give
#bg % will send it to the background

As archangel said, ctrl-z will put it in the background, but the process will be suspended, so "bg" will keep it going in the background. "fg" will bring that process back

the command "jobs" will show you what is running in the background. Typing %1 will bring you to job 1, %2 brings you to job 2 etc.

Kill %1 kills job 1.

As pureh@te mentioned, You can also use ctrl-alt-F# where the # is a number from (IIRC) 1-6. ctrl-alt-f7 brings you back to Xwindows. Each one of these terminals requires you to log in, as they are independent. The advantage is you are not running on X at all to use these multiple terminals. (does just alt-F# work now? I remember it being ctrl-alt. I so rarely use X windows....)